From Hillary Clinton's days as an intense, influential, and essentially inept co-president to husband Bill, to her establishment as a successful senator from New York, through the bitter trench warfare of the 2008 presidential primaries, and throughout her tenure as a majestic secretary of state, I have always kept the words of my high-school history teacher Dan Leary in mind.

The first woman president, Dan predicted, would be leather-tough and of conservative temperament. He cited Golda Meir of Israel and Indira Gandhi of India, who in those days of low horizons for women seemed to be remarkable anomalies. Today we could add Great Britain's Margaret Thatcher and Germany's Angela Merkel.

In Dan's view, the Eleanor Roosevelt type, the noble reformer, no matter how admired, would not succeed in the blood sport of presidential politics. (Historians, of course, have since established the private Roosevelt as a woman of monumental fortitude.) Implicit in all of this was the belief that the United States was at heart conservative and pragmatic.

A portrait of Clinton as a public pragmatist and private traditionalist emerges clearly in Duke historian William H. Chafe's commanding new book, Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal. Chafe goes deep behind the journalist's gloss, and explores with authority and insight the double helix of codependency, of mutual support and inspiration, that is the stuff of the Clinton partnership.

What emerges in Chafe's book is a unified theory of Hillary: the personal and the political. As we know, there was much that was not pretty of the Clinton White House years: Bill's serial philandering, which climaxed in his impeachment; Hillary's role in the two-bit but politically wounding Travelgate episode; her futile intransigence in trying to quash the ultimately bogus Whitewater investigation; the Republicans' craven conflation of Whitewater with the Monica Lewinsky scandal to provoke political paralysis.

The obvious question that lurks between the lines of Chafe's book, and will be present in the mind of a majority of his readers, is this: can Hillary Clinton, the one we know now, become America's first woman president?

The politics of trivia, obstruction, and deceit — the essence of today's radical Republicans — were distilled during the Clinton years. That Hillary correctly intuited the existence of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" long before she pronounced those words in 1998 on the Today show demonstrate Clinton's powers of perception. Whatever her tactical failings, Clinton's response to and her engagement with that conspiracy constituted her vital education in power politics.

Hillary's challenges during her White House years are almost analogous to Franklin Roosevelt's battle with crippling polio. In both cases, the existential trials of their respective lives forged in the smithy of their souls a steel-like will to triumph.

Barack Obama stymied Clinton's fierce will when he narrowly clinched the Democratic presidential nomination. The unexpected technical mastery of Obama's camp gave him an edge that Clinton's team — despite heroic efforts — was unable to dull.

There was, however, more to Obama's victory than strategic cunning — supplemented, for sure, with his own cool charisma. The weirdness of the Clinton White House years, fatigue with the unusual dynamics of Hillary and Bill's marriage and the sheer novelty of a wife following her husband to the presidency put the voters on guard.

G(rand) O(ld) P(ricks) For years, I've chronicled in the Phoenix the dwindling ranks of Republican women in elected office, and suggested that their absence will ultimately hurt the GOP.

The weird politics of this year’s ballot questions The only two contested referendum questions on November's ballot — physician-prescribed suicide and medical marijuana — are totally sex-free. But some of the donors trying to stop both are notorious homophobes.

The Kennedys will rise again! As you've probably heard a couple thousand times by now, Rhode Island Representative Patrick J. Kennedy's retirement means Washington is without a member of Team Camelot for the first time in 64 years.

In a Bind "Binders full of women" were the social-media sensation of last week's presidential debate.

An attack ad you’ll never see Here's a Mitt Romney commercial that could topple the popular notion that President Obama cares more about vulnerable Americans than his challenger does.

Death knell for the local GOP? Obituaries for the Massachusetts Republican Party have been written many times — I've contributed several items to that genre myself.

A Statesman Too Late? The congressional debt "super committee" has begun its work, and already there are signs that its task is hopeless.

Don't be fooled: the Google-Verizon plan would kill Net Neutrality Want evidence that Google is just another avaricious, monopoly-minded corporate behemoth? Consider this: Google has retreated from its long-held support for net neutrality and teamed with Verizon to suggest that new laws allow Internet providers to favor some Web services over others.

After Clinton With a world full of crises in full flower, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton surprised a lot of people last week by declaring, in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, that she will not continue to serve beyond 2012, should Barack Obama win a second term as president.

WHY EVERYONE HATES WASHINGTON | August 30, 2013 If you want to understand why the United States appears to be beyond political redemption, read 'This Town.'

THE GLOBE SALE, CONTEXTUALIZED | February 27, 2013 News that the Globe was on the auction block was certainly a shock, but it should have been no surprise.

KEVIN, WE HARDLY KNEW YE | December 19, 2012 Thanks to the initiative of journalism-advocacy group MuckRock, 500 pages of raw and redacted FBI files focusing on allegations of corruption during the 1970s in the administration of the late Boston mayor Kevin White are now available to the public.

HUB FANS BID BARON ADIEU | November 16, 2012 In the 1960s and 1970s, when the media sky was as expansive as the horizon of Fenway Park, Boston Globe editor Tom Winship hankered to make the Globe one of the nation's top 10 dailies. He succeeded.